Some found out they didn't qualify for WARN Act protections like two-months notice because the company had classified them as remote workers.

The invisible force behind all of this is no mystery to anyone paying attention to the city's tech economy. San Francisco is home to some of the most valuable private companies in the world, and their employees have been quietly accumulating — and, increasingly, cashing out — fortunes.

The Clips feed aims to enable discovery by offering users a scrollable feed with short snippets of shows and movies.

Intel's stock has risen a stunning 490% over the past year, a bet by Wall Street that may be running well ahead of the company's actual turnaround.

Cloudflare announced its first large-scale layoff. CEO Matthew Prince says because of AI efficiency gains, the company doesn't need as many support roles.

More than 500 people will be affected by the closures. “We must refocus on our core business,” Porsche CEO and executive chair Michael Leiters said in a statement. "This is the indispensable foundation for a successful strategic realignment. This forces us to make painful cuts — including our subsidiaries."

The VC firm, which focuses on mothers as consumers, raised a $10 million debut fund.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into Avride after identifying more than a dozen crashes and one minor injury.

A report by Poland’s top intelligence agency accused Russia of sabotage and hacking activities against the country’s military and civilian infrastructure.

Former cybersecurity executive Peter Williams stole several surveillance and hacking tools and sold them for $1.3 million to a Russian broker that works with Putin’s government.

The initial set of files housed on the site will include those containing unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entire U.S. government. The materials have been reviewed for security purposes, but many have "not yet been analyzed for resolution of any anomalies," the Department's statement read.

Truecaller's ad revenue declined by 44%, leading to the layoffs.

Learn what it takes to build a Series A in 2027 from top VCs at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, taking place at San Francisco’s Moscone West on October 13-15. Register today to hear this session live on the Builders Stage.

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After years of hints and preparation, Lime plans to enter the public markets. The company intends to list on ​Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "LIME." Lime did not share terms of the offering.

PJM Interconnection — which oversees the grid for some of the densest data center developments on Earth — wants to overhaul itself. Not everyone thinks it's up to the task.

Airbnb also said its customer support AI bot now handles 40% of issues without escalating to a human agent.

Like many AI companies automating work that humans currently do, Basata will eventually face a harder question about where the line is between augmenting workers and displacing them. For now, the founders say the administrative staff they work with aren't worried about that; they're more worried about drowning.

The company is reportedly in talks to raise another $750 million at a pre-money valuation of more than $40 billion. It last raised in November at $32 billion.

The new features could be handy for customer service systems, but OpenAI says they have applications that work across a variety of other fields, including education and creator platforms.

The company made a series of other announcements during earnings, including a new commercial contract, a pilot program in Canada, and a collaboration.

Disney CEO Josh D'Amaro, who took over for Bob Iger earlier this year, has emphasized his intent to streamline the Disney experience.

AI startup Pit is led by the co-founders of European scooter giant Voi and backed by a16z, which is leading the startup’s $16 million seed round.

The cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed to have hacked Instructure again, defacing the login pages of several Instructure customer schools with an extortion message.

Gusto has shared an impressive milestone on its actual revenue, not an ARR number that estimates future income.

The company is expanding its efforts to protect ChatGPT users in cases where conversations may turn to self-harm.

The new benchmark rating applies to 2026 Tesla Model Y vehicles assembled on or after November 12, 2025.

Perplexity's Personal Computer brings AI agents to your Mac, and is now open to everyone.

Elon Musk's legal effort to dismantle OpenAI may hinge on how its for-profit subsidiary enhances or detracts from the frontier lab's founding mission of ensuring that humanity benefits from artificial general intelligence.

Based on Whitney Wolfe Herd's past comments about Bumble's new direction, the company is expected to lean into AI -- Bumble is even working on an AI dating assistant called Bee, and the CEO has made many comments over the years about how AI will be "a supercharger to love and relationships."

Built on the back of the sizable and influential BookTok community -- creators who discuss and review books on TikTok -- the app offered readers a place to chronicle and rate their books, get recommendations, and even add photos of things like favorite quotes or memes, or share playlists that match the book's vibes.

Stockholm-based vibe-coding platform Lovable is offering employees an automatic 10% raise as a way to sidestep classic corporate politics.

An unknown group of hackers is breaking into systems previously breached by the cybercrime group TeamPCP. Once inside, the hackers immediately kick out TeamPCP and remove its hacking tools from the victims’ systems.

Prediction market startup Kalshi has raised a $1 billion Series F round led by Coatue.

Melinda Lewison's departure raises questions about Bezos' support and involvement with the startup at a time when the Amazon founder is now apparently focused on robotics at his new startup, Project Prometheus.

Security researchers at Mozilla say Anthropic's Mythos has unearthed a wealth of high-severity bugs in Firefox.

The Gemini-powered health coach will act as a combination fitness coach, sleep expert, and health and wellness advisor.

The device comes with health and fitness tracking like 24/7 heart rate, heart rhythm monitoring with A-fib alerts, SpO2, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep stages and duration, and more.

Startup Battlefield 200 applications are open, but only for three more weeks. Apply by May 27 for your shot at VC access, global visibility, TechCrunch coverage, $100,000 equity-free, and more opportunities for major scaling impact.

Toronto police said this is the "first known instance" of an SMS blaster being used in Canada.

If startup visibility, traction, and real deals matter, you should be on the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 exhibit floor. Get your 6' exhibit table before your competitor does.

Skyroot's valuation has more than doubled since 2023 as the Indian rocket startup prepares for the country's first private orbital launch.

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Moonshot's annualized recurring revenue topped $200 million in April, driven by rapid growth in paid subscriptions and API usage.

Users will be able to create a podcast from Codex or Claude Code and import it to Spotify.

Spotify's AI DJ feature now supports French, German, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Earlier this week, five people who touch every layer of the AI supply chain sat down at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, where they talked with TechCrunch about everything from chip shortages to orbital data centers to the possibility that the whole architecture that undergirds the tech is wrong.

The investment comes as Pronto scales to 26,000 daily bookings and the market heads toward a potential $18 billion size.

Barry Diller defended OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while warning that AGI remains an unpredictable force needing guardrails.

The deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity's AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat.

xAI's real business may be more about building data centers than training AI models. 

Corgi announced on Wednesday a $160 million Series B, led by TCV, valuing the startup at $1.3 billion.

The push for new data centers at Microsoft is putting its key clean power goals at risk.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev says more than 150,000 retail investors joined the fintech’s new venture fund, which offers exposure to private tech companies like OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks, and Oura before they go public.

Cutthroat negotiations between startup founders are rarely shared so publicly, especially when a company becomes as world-changing as OpenAI.

U.S. prosecutors said a ransomware gang fueled Russian government corruption, and allowed the gang's leaders to avoid paying taxes and dodge the country's military draft.

Braintrust, a startup that makes an “operating system for engineers building AI software,” notified customers that hackers broke into one of its Amazon cloud environments, and is asking customers to rotate their API keys.

The project would be a "multi-phase, next-generation, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing and advanced computing fabrication facility," according to the proposal.

The Chinese AI lab came to prominence in early 2025 after launching a large language model that trained on a fraction of the compute power and at a fraction of the cost of the big U.S. models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic.

The new feature is a small win for Android users, as it gives them more control over how much location data they share with websites.

While citing web forums and discussion boards can help users find answers to more niche queries, this design choice could also prove chaotic.

Genesis AI, a startup that raised a $105 million seed round to build foundational AI for robotics, has unveiled its first model, GENE-26.5, but also a demo showcasing a set of robotic hands performing complex tasks.

Match Group said that it's slowing its hiring plans for the rest of the year because AI tools "cost a lot of money."

Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit for overpromising the arrival of Siri's AI features.

Ethos says it is onboarding 35,000 experts per week.

Aurora said it plans to expand to new routes between McLane distribution centers across the U.S. Sun Belt by the end of 2026.

Leaders from Coinbase, M13, and Mignano Law Group talk about how M&A is an early-stage strategy at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register to hear this live.

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Samsung crossed the $1 trillion valuation mark after shares surged on AI-driven chip demand, making it only the second Asian company after TSMC to hit the milestone.

A new survey found that kids find it easy to bypass age checks, despite a rise in age-verification laws around the world.

The new Paper Pure is lighter and faster than the reMarkable 2, which is going to be retired six years since its launch.

Enterprise AI will be QuTwo’s bread and butter. “AI is the north star that we will continue to aim for. Quantum is just a new type of compute,” said Sarlin, who is adamant that QuTwo is an AI company.

Wonder wants to turn its robotic kitchens into AI-powered “restaurant factories,” letting anyone spin up a virtual food brand with a prompt.

Nuro has been granted a permit to begin driverless testing of Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with its autonomous tech on California public roads — vehicles that will eventually be used in Uber’s premium robotaxi service. But the Silicon Valley-based startup says it isn’t quite ready to begin.

SAP plans to buy German AI startup Prior Labs and invest heavily in it. It is also prohibiting customers' agents use to a select few like Nvidia's NemoClaw.

The company is making a big bet that the swiping model is outdated and most matches never turn into actual dates. The company wants to fix that by redesigning profiles, changing how people interact, and focusing a lot more on getting users to meet in real life.

Altara’s AI aims to diagnose failures and help speed up R&D by unifying data siloed across spreadsheets and legacy systems.

Lucid Motors pulled its guidance for the year, as it navigates swelling inventory and a companywide cost-cutting measure.

As some of the biggest VCs in crypto start to consider funding AI startups, a16z crypto's new fund will stay the course.

With Apple's latest operating system updates, users will reportedly have their pick of which third-party AI models they want to use for a host of tasks.

Christophe Fouquet, who became ASML's CEO in 2024 after more than a decade at the company, sat down with this editor on the rooftop deck of his Beverly Hills hotel Tuesday morning ahead of his appearance at the Milken Institute Global Conference. Dressed in a blue suit and white shirt, he was relaxed — even when the conversation turned to the rivals.

VW Group's stake will continue to grow under the $5.8 billion joint venture with Rivian.

By bringing messaging to the web, Threads is aligning its desktop experience more closely with competitors like X and Bluesky.

Arnell joins Gebbia’s National Design Studio under Trump to unify UX across 27,000 federal sites and streamline how Americans use government services.

According to Pennsylvania's filing, a Character.AI chatbot presented itself as a licensed psychiatrist during a state investigation, and also fabricated a serial number for its state medical license.

The company said the model reduces hallucination in sensitive areas such as law, medicine, and finance, while maintaining the low latency of its predecessor.

PayPal is pitching an AI-led turnaround, tying automation and restructuring to $1.5 billion in savings as it cuts jobs and works to modernize its tech stack.

Etsy's new native app within ChatGPT aims to be a conversational shopping experience for users.

The cybersecurity company says it's seen thousands of infection attempts, and at least a dozen successful hacks after users installed malicious versions of the popular Windows software.

The data breach at education tech giant Instructure includes students' private data, according to a sample of the allegedly stolen data seen by TechCrunch.

The visual analysis system is now operating in select countries, but Meta says it's working toward a broader rollout.

ElevenLabs reveals new investors, hits $500M ARR, and expands enterprise footprint as voice AI becomes a critical interface.

The Seattle-based startup's Series A round was led by Glilot Capital, NFX, and SignalFire, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

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Krutrim's pivot to cloud after layoffs and limited product updates reflects the economic challenges of building AI models in India.

Amazon will buy a new type of HVAC system for its commercial buildings to slash energy use.

The restructuring is aimed at addressing market volatility and increasing the use of AI tools to improve efficiency.

The startup has put a spin on repurposing EV batteries, CEO Edward Chiang told TechCrunch.

The Nvidia CEO seems to feel that claims of AI's job-killing potential have been greatly exaggerated.

Enhanced geothermal startup Fervo Energy’s IPO could value the company at up to $6.5 billion.

U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA says the CopyFail bug is being actively used in hacking campaigns, and poses a major risk to servers and data centers that rely on Linux.

AI chip maker Cerebras is heading for a blockbuster IPO that could value it at $26.6 billion or more. Its relationship with OpenAI is deep and rich.

Appfigures finds visual model launches generate 6.5x more downloads — but most don’t convert that spike into revenue.

Katie Haun announced on Monday that $1 billion has been raised across new funds to continue the firm’s thesis of backing crypto and blockchain startups.

Days after the disclosure of a critical vulnerability in popular web hosting software cPanel and WHM, hackers are now targeting and hacking thousands of vulnerable websites.

Stuart Russell is a long-time AI researcher who thinks governments need to restrain frontier labs.

The raise gives Sierra more than $1 billion to work with — capital the company says it will use to become the "global standard" for AI-powered customer experiences.

Musk texted OpenAI's president and co-founder saying that he and CEO Sam Altman "will be the most hated men in America" if OpenAI doesn't settle the suit.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have partnered with asset managers to more aggressively market their enterprise AI products.

Acorn lets organizations build and run their own online communities using decentralized tech, with custom feeds, moderation, and analytics tools.

Virginia and Washington, D.C. paused the data collection and sharing, after Bloomberg's investigation found their health insurance marketplaces were sharing users' information with advertisers.

The new service, called Amazon Supply Chain Services, pits the e-commerce giant directly against UPS and FedEx.

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Barocal might have discovered a cheap, nonpolluting material that could dethrone today's refrigeration technology.

DoorDash on Monday added new AI-powered tools that let merchants speed up onboarding, edit photos to make dishes look better, and create new websites from existing content.

A sensor that can simultaneously capture depth and image data has long been a "holy grail," Ouster CEO Angus Pacala told TechCrunch.

The portfolio he has assembled since 2019 is dotted with technologies that have become more widely interesting to VCs over the last year.

Within hours he'd thrown up a website — a janky, one-hour job, by his own admission — and by Sunday, 36,000 "founding patrons" had pledged nearly $23 million, crashing his servers in the process.

The ad comes from Artisan, the AI startup behind billboards urging businesses to "stop hiring humans."

A new study examines how large language models perform in a variety of medical contexts, including real emergency room cases — where at least one model seemed to be more accurate than human doctors.

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.

The Xteink X3 is a delightfully tiny, MagSafe-compatible e-ink reader that attaches to the back of your phone like a Pop Socket.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said that only performances “credited in the film’s legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent” will be eligible for Academy Awards.

For most of Ask Jeeves' 30-year history, it's been overshadowed by other search products, especially Google.

"The Magician's Nephew" looks like a big next step in Netflix's thawing relationship with movie theaters.

AI-powered dictation apps are useful for replying to emails, taking notes, and even coding through your voice

It is not that European startups never get attention — Lovable and Mistral AI are proof of that. But there are many more that insiders are tracking.

Praveen Neppalli Naga, Uber's chief technology officer, revealed the plan in an interview at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, describing it as a natural extension of a nascent program the company announced in late January called AV Labs.

At TechCrunch's sold-out StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Thursday night, we covered a lot of ground in a short time, beginning with the question everyone in the industry is asking right now: in a world where rival Cursor is reportedly in talks to be acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion, is Replit also bound to sell?

The DTC skin, hair, and menopause care brand will use the non-dilutive capital to super-charge customer acquisition.

Meta bought humanoid startup Assured Robot Intelligence to beef up its AI models for robots, the company said.

Coatue, one of the biggest names in venture capital, has a new venture that is reportedly buying land near large power sources.

Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it’s already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk’s argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the […]

The deals come as the DOD has doubled down on diversifying its exposure to AI vendors in the wake of its controversial dispute with Anthropic over usage terms of its AI models.

A group of hacktivists have claimed responsibility for a distributed denial-of-service attack, which has affected several Ubuntu and Canonical websites, and prevented users from updating the Linux-based operating system.

The company saw a 30% year-on-year jump in the number of people using search every week, CEO Steve Huffman said on Thursday.

Users in India are embracing ChatGPT Images 2.0 for creative, personal visuals — from avatars to cinematic portraits.

Cook warned that Apple is facing supply-chain headwinds from RAMageddon that could impact its business.

Subscription billing fintech Skio sold to its competitor Recharge in what was a healthy exit, according to its founder and former CEO.

Anthropic is asking investors to submit allocations for the AI company’s latest fundraise within the next 48 hours, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Apple said it will be supply-constrained on Mac mini, Studio, and Neo in the next quarter, too.

The two wildly fast-growing rivals have raised massive sums, pushed into each other's home turf, and now have dueling ad campaigns.

Rivian has reworked its loan deal with the Department of Energy and now expects to borrow $4.5 billion to build its new factory in Georgia, down from the original amount of $6.6 billion.

Web hosts are scrambling to fix the bug under active attack by hackers. One company said hackers have been abusing the bug for months.

OpenAI will begin rolling out its cybersecurity testing tool, GPT-5.5 Cyber only "to critical cyber defenders" at first.

The perpetually struggling EV company made the payments while being investigated by the SEC. That four-year probe was ultimately closed in March.

OpenAI is launching additional opt-in protections for ChatGPT accounts. The new security initiative includes a new partnership with security key provider Yubico.

"Distillation" is a hot topic as frontier labs try to prevent smaller competitors from copying their models.

BioticsAI CEO Robhy Bustami joined Isabelle Johannessen on Build Mode to discuss how the company has navigated a highly regulated space and kept the team motivated while cutting through all the red tape.

The move signals Google’s push to bring more advanced, conversational AI into the driving experience.

The new hub features dedicated college group chats and personalized feeds designed to help students stay connected with their campus communities, even while they’re away for the summer.

Link lets users connect cards, banks, and subscriptions, then authorize AI agents to spend securely via approval flows.

Salesforce lets its customers lead its product roadmap with the thinking that if one enterprise customer has a problem, the others likely do too.

Hertz is creating a new affiliate company called "Oro Mobility" to provide fleet management solutions "across a range of mobility segments."

VC firm 137 Ventures has raised over $700 million to back growth-stage startups. Its portfolio includes SpaceX, Anduril, Hadrian.

The security bug is now fixed, but the patient who found it said it was challenging to alert the software company about the issue.

X is rolling out a rebuilt ads platform powered by AI as it works to grow revenue again.

Spotify looks for an identifiable artist presence both on and off platform, like concert dates, merch, and linked social accounts on their artist profile.

Netflix is redesigning its mobile app and introducing Clips, a vertical video feed intended to help users discover new content by sharing highlights from original Netflix programming.

Meta said over 8 billion advertisers have used at least one of its GenAI tools

The update targets content aggregators that don't post original content and instead simply re-upload others' posts.

You need infrastructure to build AI and robots, but apparently you also need AI and robots to build infrastructure.

PhonePe and Google Pay command 80% of India's UPI instant payments network. Rivals are set to meet with regulators to lobby for restrictions.

The e-commerce giant is making more money than expected from AWS but it's also spending a lot, and will continue to do so in the near term, its chief executive said.

The maker of Claude has received multiple preemptive offers at valuations in the $850 billion to $900 billion range, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Elon Musk took the stand for the second day for his attempt to legally dismantle OpenAI.

Meta is losing billions on Reality Labs each quarter, and its AI expenditures are only going to increase its spending.

Microsoft gets to offer OpenAI's tech to its cloud customers and doesn't have to pay for it. "We fully plan to exploit it," Nadella said.

Despite the lingering perception that no one really uses Copilot, Microsoft said on Wednesday that the number of users and engagement is growing.

Google Cloud topped $20B in quarterly revenue for the first time, fueled by surging demand for AI. But capacity constraints mean it could have grown even faster.

Google added 25M paid subscriptions in Q1, reaching 350M total, as YouTube and Google One grow.

Surprise! Fusion startup Zap Energy says it will be developing fission reactors alongside its fusion devices.

The AI agent-tool startup founded by former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has raised $100 million, led by Sequoia, months after raising a previous $100 million.

Google says the new feature will leverage AI technology to automatically create a copy of your wardrobe that's based on the pieces of clothing appearing in your Google Photos library.

Google TV just got more Gemini features, including the ability to transform photos and videos with tools Nano Banana and Veo.

On Wednesday, Pursuit announced a $22 million Series A round led by Mike Rosengarten, the co-founder of OpenGov, with big-name VCs participating.

Roku’s $2.99 streaming service Howdy has topped 1M subscribers, showing demand for cheaper, low-commitment alternatives to pricier streamers.

Uber announced several new features on Wednesday during its annual event, which push far beyond the company's original ride-hailing purpose and deeper into its users' lives.

Apple lost its bid to pause court-ordered App Store payment changes, keeping external purchase links in place as its case with Epic heads toward the Supreme Court.

When Earth AI started hitting months-long delays in its search for critical minerals, it decided to take matters into its own hands.

The government of Sri Lanka has lost more than $3 million in two recent, separate cybersecurity incidents as the country continues to recover from its 2022 debt crisis.

A defense startup just raised $82 million to put drone factories inside shipping containers and bring manufacturing to the front lines.

BMW i Ventures is interested in startups working on agentic AI and physical AI, as well as industrial software, advanced materials, and manufacturing and supply chain technologies.

Think Discord chats, but with AI characters in addition to humans. 

When you translate a word, sentence, or phrase, you can navigate into the "Practice" menu to find a "Pronounce" button, which shows you phonetics that you can say out loud to practice speaking the translated text.

Divine offers access to an archive of roughly 500,000 Vine videos, restored from a backup of the original service, and allows creators to post new Vines once again.

We visited Scout AI's training ground where it's working on AI agents that can help individual soldiers control fleets of autonomous vehicles.

Geopolitical turmoil has made venture investing challenging, leading Kompas VC to carve out a niche in startups focused on the physical world.

It's a story Musk has told before -- in interviews and to author Walter Isaacson for his bestselling biography of Musk -- but Tuesday was the first time he said it under oath.

A day after OpenAI got Microsoft to agree to end exclusive rights, AWS announced a slate of OpenAI model offerings, including a new agent service.

Amazon's new "Join the chat" feature lets you ask questions about products and receive AI-powered audio responses.

The app is Match Group's newest attempt to get mobile users excited about online romance again.

After Anthropic refused to allow the DoD to use its AI for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, Google has signed a new contract with the department.